And Cowboy Makes Three

by Deb Kastner

  “There are more than one?”

  Ange sniffed softly. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be wandering around in public if I’d had any choice in the matter.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, me neither, exactly. I only came to town to pay my respects and get the sale started on Granny’s ranch.”

  “So, you are selling, then?”

  Her gaze widened. “Of course. What on earth would I do with a sheep farm?”

  “I’m an interested buyer, you know.”

  She nodded. “I figured. But I also assumed I could take care of the estate and the paperwork without actually having to see you—” Her words skidded. “I mean, any potential buyers. Instead, I’m out and about at a packed town function. Which is exactly where I don’t want to be. Especially not making the kind of scene I ended up making. I absolutely didn’t have any intention of seeing you again.”

  “So why are you here, then?”

  “The letter in the first envelope had very specific instructions. It was addressed to me from Granny. Jo said that Granny would understand if I wanted to sell the ranch, but that she requested I follow the instructions in the envelope. Kind of like a last wish, I guess.”

  “And that said...?”

  “Picnic With Jo.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Wow. That’s about as vague as it gets. But Jo knew a lot more about what Granny was asking than you did. And she didn’t even hint about what you were walking into?”

  “Not one word. She must have been busting up inside not being able to tell me anything.”

  “So you didn’t know anything about the auction being today? Or, most especially, about buying me at auction before the event even got off the ground?”

  “No, but Jo certainly did. And so, I think, did Granny. Before she passed on, she requested that I visit her on this particular weekend. I’m wondering if she wanted me to attend this auction all along, even if she’d still been here to come with me.”

  “You think we’ve been set up?”

  Ange frowned and nodded, looking none too pleased by the thought.

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Granny wanted to make sure the sale of the ranch went smoothly.”

  “That doesn’t feel like enough of an explanation. We didn’t have to meet at the auction to work out the details of our real estate transaction. And why go to all the trouble of the cryptic letter? Why not just spell it all out?” he asked.

  Ange held up the second envelope, which Rowdy could now clearly see had both of their names scrawled on it.

  “I have no idea. Here’s hoping this one will tell us exactly where we’re supposed to go from here.”

  Toby worked the bottle from his mouth with a gurgle and Angelica shifted him to her shoulder.

  She pushed the envelope in Rowdy’s direction. “I guess we won’t know until we open it. Why don’t you do the honors, since I’ve got my hands full?”

  Rowdy plucked the envelope from her grasp and gingerly opened it, unfolding the single tri-folded sheet of typing paper. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to be any part of this, but Granny Frances, as she’d insisted he call her back when he was a teenage boy dating her granddaughter, had been a huge influence in his life. He couldn’t let her down now.

  She was a stubborn woman who’d continued to manage her ranch for as long as possible, saying it gave her great joy to be with her animals and her pain wasn’t going to keep her down.

  But eventually, it had become too hard even for one as strong and stoic as Granny Frances.

  In her final weeks, when she’d gotten too sick to care for herself, much less her flock, on her own, a palliative care nurse had come to look out for Granny Frances and Rowdy had stepped in and done the ranch work for her.

  In reality, at this point he was already running Granny Frances’s ranch as if it was his own. As long as another buyer with deep pockets didn’t sweep in, which wasn’t likely in a town as small as Serendipity, it was just a matter of signing the papers to make the land his legally as well as practically.

  His gaze quickly took in the words on Granny’s missive and he shook his head.

  If they were expecting answers, this letter didn’t contain them.

  These words were, in fact, the exact opposite.

  “Feed My Sheep.”

  Three words in Granny Frances’s handwriting.

  Three lousy words.

  “Great,” Ange groaned. “Another cryptic note. What do you suppose this one means?”

  Rowdy ran a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “It sounds like something out of the Holy Scriptures. You know, when Jesus was speaking to Peter and kept telling him to feed his sheep? You think this is some kind of secret message?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even certain Granny was lucid when she wrote this stuff down. Maybe what she really meant to convey didn’t quite translate to paper.”

  Rowdy hoped that was the case, but he sincerely doubted it. Life was never that simple, and he’d been there during Granny Frances’s final days. She had been coherent until her very last moments, when she had given her soul up to Jesus.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Whatever this letter means, she knew what she was doing when she wrote it. I’m sorry you weren’t able to be there with her during her last moments, but I was, and I can tell you definitively that she was fully lucid all the way up to the end.”

  His words weren’t quite the accusation they had been earlier. “The last word she breathed was Jesus. Her expression was so peaceful. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind her Savior was there waiting with open arms to welcome her into heaven.”

  Tears sprang to Ange’s eyes and she dashed them back with her palm, while her face blotched with red and purple. Rowdy thought she might be having trouble holding herself together. She’d always been a private person and her struggle with grief was real, even if everything else she’d ever told him varied from the truth in some way.

  And the worst part was, seeing her tears tore at him, ripping into his chest.

  He didn’t know how he felt about her expressing her grief. When Ange had left Serendipity, it had been for good. She had not even come to visit Granny Frances.

  Not once.

  And though he now understood why she had missed Granny’s funeral, that didn’t make the whole situation any less confusing.

  Here she was now, trying to make things right when it was too late for her to do so.

  Too late for Granny Frances.

  And too late for him.

  For them.

  He swallowed hard, but a smile lingered on his lips despite the fresh wave of grief.

  He stammered quickly over his next sentence, returning the conversation to safer grounds.

  “J-Jo appeared to know exactly what was going on,” he pointed out. “Maybe we should just toss the letter and ask her straight out. I’ll bet she has answers.”

  “Oh, I intend to,” Ange assured him.

  “Although how much she’ll divulge is another thing entirely. If she made a pact with Granny Frances, we are only going to learn what your granny wanted us to know.”

  “That’s right. So I guess we have to play sleuth and see if we can figure it out on our own before we approach Jo on the matter.”

  “Well, the first note was literal, right?” he asked, trying to make logic out of the cryptic words. “Picnic With Jo?”

  “Up to a point, it was. Obviously, there was a lot Granny left out. Intentionally, I suspect.”

  “So, what if this letter is the same? Maybe she really means you should feed her sheep.”

  “Me? I don’t know the first thing about sheep.” Her gaze widened and for a moment, she gaped at him. “There
aren’t any sheep at her ranch anymore, are there? She adored her sheep. I remember she used to lovingly refer to them as her woolies. She wouldn’t let them starve. I guess I just assumed that since Granny knew she had a terminal disease, she’d have all her affairs in order and sell her stock off before she passed.”

  He bit on the inside of his cheek, wondering just how much he ought to tell her.

  Any way he looked at it, Rowdy didn’t like where this was going. The way he saw it, and the only interpretation that made any sense, was that Granny Frances’s intention was for him to subtly introduce Ange to the ins and outs of ranch life, possibly hoping she’d decide to keep the land in the family.

  But that was unfair, for so many reasons. For one thing, Ange was the furthest thing from a rancher ever, and she’d need a ton of help—assistance Granny Frances assumed would come from Rowdy.

  And for another, though Granny Frances knew he had taken over her ranch out of love for her, she also had to have known he needed to expand if he was going to keep making a profit on his land.

  They had never spoken about it, but joining their two ranches was the perfect answer to that dilemma. She would have had to have been blind not to recognize the hope he carried in his heart for the joining of the properties, and Granny Frances was as astute a woman as one could find anywhere.

  “I’ve been taking care of her stock,” he admitted, his thoughts working frantically.

  Ange looked mortified. “You don’t really think she wants you to teach me how to care for sheep, do you?”

  He shrugged.

  It crossed his mind that he could sabotage the plans to get Ange on board to keep the ranch, if that was what they were. After all, Ange deciding to do so was the exact opposite of what Rowdy wanted to happen.

  But deep down, Rowdy knew he would never be so underhanded as to resort to anything as devious as that. It wasn’t in his nature. Nor would God be happy with that kind of thinking—much less acting.

  Besides, as far as he knew, Ange still agreed with him about how Granny Frances’s estate should be handled—so there should be no conflict despite Granny Frances’s note suggesting that Ange needed to learn to feed the sheep.

  No. Ange wanted to sell her ranch.

  To him.

  And he wanted to buy.

  It was a win-win, putting enough money in her pocket to find a good place to live in the city and have some left over for Toby’s long-term care.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid Ange would change her mind and decide to stick around. Ranch work was hard and dusty. If anything, Feed My Sheep would convince her that she should sell like nothing else might.

  Even one day of herding sheep and mucking around in a smelly barn would be enough to send her running back to Denver faster than she could say “Giddyap.” He would put his last nickel on the fact that she didn’t even own a pair of mud boots.

  And he had loved Granny Frances. That fact was cut-and-dried. If teaching Ange to feed Granny’s sheep would honor the deceased’s memory, then he would cowboy up and do it, even if every second in her presence was torture, plain and simple.

  He just had to hold on to the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever. Whatever the outcome of this game Granny Frances was playing with them, it would end eventually.

  He would hold fast to the idea that Ange had indicated she wanted to sell him the ranch. The sooner he cooperated with this—whatever this was—the sooner she would leave and he could take full ownership of Granny Frances’s ranch and incorporate it into his own.

  “You don’t think—” Ange started, and then her sentence dropped off and her face drained of color. “This is the second envelope. Jo didn’t say it was the last one. What if there are more letters after this one? More stuff she wants us to do, more riddles we have to figure out? Could this be some kind of outrageous scavenger hunt Granny is sending us on?”

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  Rowdy shook his head voraciously as his thoughts denied the possibility.

  “I don’t think we ought to keep speculating on this bit. We need to go find Jo and clear up the confusion,” he said. “There’s no question that I want to honor Granny Frances’s memory, but...”

  “Exactly,” she said, even though he hadn’t finished his sentence. “Whatever needs doing, needs doing quickly. I absolutely cannot stick around after this weekend. My flight back to Denver leaves tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got to return to my job on Monday. It’s my first day back after my maternity leave. I’ll lose my position for sure if I don’t show up. My boss is a real stickler about stuff like that.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work in a five-star hotel as part of the dining staff for large, catered events. I’m one of those white-gloved banquet servers you encounter when you go to large meetings at a hotel. We have a lot of major corporations that come through, as well as conventions that meet there.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Not really. It’s a lot of standing and people can get really snooty. But it pays the bills, and I can’t afford to be picky. I’m not going to have the money to pay anything if I don’t get back there on time. Oh, the joys of living from paycheck to paycheck.”

  Rowdy didn’t know about that. He lived from season to season.

  “How old is Toby?” Rowdy asked, as what Ange had said earlier suddenly clicked. She had indicated she’d missed Granny Frances’s funeral because she was in the hospital having Toby, but that was only three weeks ago.

  “Three weeks,” Ange confirmed.

  “Don’t you get maternity leave for twelve weeks?” He had no idea where he’d pulled that information from. A television show, maybe. But it sounded fair enough.

  She scoffed softly. “In the best of all worlds. I’m allowed to take twelve weeks, but my checkbook can’t handle the money I’d lose. Now I have Toby to support. I can’t afford to take off a whole twelve weeks. Three was pushing it.”

  Rowdy didn’t know if Granny Frances had left Ange any money in her will, but it occurred to him that if they could get this deal done with the real estate, that would give Ange something to ease her load.

  “Let’s talk to Jo and see what we can do. The sooner, the better. It’s possible that we will be able to work out some of the details about me buying Granny Frances’s ranch, which would in turn save you the trouble of having to come back to Serendipity.”

  Her face reddened. “Pushy, much?”

  He scowled and shook his head. He was trying to be nice and she was taking it all the wrong way.

  “That’s not what I meant. Am I mistaken? I thought that selling the ranch was what you wanted to do.”

  She sighed. “It is. I just don’t like feeling as if you are corralling me out of town. You don’t have to be brash about it. I get the hint.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry. We’ll just have to set aside the whole Feed My Sheep thing and let Jo know that we aren’t going to continue. Surely, it can’t be so important that we have to drop our entire lives to pursue it.”

  “Maybe not,” he admitted.

  “Well, like I said, I have to be on a plane tomorrow afternoon anyway, so I can’t keep playing this peculiar game even if I wanted to.”

  She smiled, but Rowdy could see the trouble she was having in curling her lips upward. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ll be out of your life tomorrow—and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  Chapter Three

  True to her word, Angelica took Toby and left Serendipity the next day. But by Friday afternoon, she had returned to her hometown without the slightest idea of what she was going to do next.

  She had been telling the truth when she’d informed Rowdy that she didn’t plan to pop back up in town anytime soon—or ever—but once in Denver she’d found that she couldn’t set her time in Serendipity and with Rowdy asid
e as easily as all that.

  In her heart of hearts, she wasn’t sure she had done the right thing by returning to the big city and proceeding with selling Granny’s ranch.

  Not for herself, and not for Toby.

  The whole envelope-deliveries-and-cryptic-messages thing felt like unfinished business. She’d left town without fulfilling Granny’s request, and that really bothered her.

  She hadn’t fed any sheep yet.

  Instead, she’d run away from the obligation. Just as she’d done before.

  When the going got tough, Angelica bolted.

  It was her modus operandi.

  She hated to think that after all this time and experience, she hadn’t changed. Worse yet, what she did affected Toby.

  Was Toby really better off in Denver? Or was she just trying to take the easy way out?

  No. She couldn’t repeat her mistakes.

  Not again.

  Not even knowing Rowdy wouldn’t be thrilled to see her. She’d simply have to explain her reasons for returning and hope he’d understand.

  And she didn’t even want to think about how the rest of the town would perceive her return, particularly driving a moving van filled with what little furniture she had, with her car hooked up behind.

  Maybe that was part of the reason she had to go back. To prove to herself and the people of Serendipity that she had changed. That she was no longer the rebellious teenager and young adult, but that the Lord had touched her heart and altered her world. And that becoming a mother to Toby had made a substantial difference, as well.

  She was putting Toby’s crib together in the guest bedroom, Toby gurgling in the bouncer by her side, when the doorbell rang. She started in surprise.

  She wasn’t expecting anyone.

  “Guess I’d better get that, yeah, little man?”

  She moved Toby, bouncer and all, into the living room and opened the door to find a beaming Jo on the other side, her arms laden with a large box of prepared casserole dishes.

  “What is all this?” she asked.